NVIDIA has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12,930,300,000, founder and CEO Jensen Huang announced on the company's blog on 3 September 2026. The deal hands the default home of open-source AI — more than 3 million models used by over 18 million developers — to the company that sells the GPUs most of those models run on.
Hugging Face co-founder and CEO Clément Delangue told CNBC he approached Huang first, over the summer, and that talks moved quickly.
"and a few weeks later, here we are."
Hugging Face keeps its name and its iconic brand, according to Huang's post.
What Changes for Developers
Nothing yet. Huang's post commits to Hugging Face remaining open to the entire AI ecosystem, and states plainly that "NVIDIA compute will not be required" to build on or deploy through the platform. Nvidia adds that multi-cloud and multi-accelerator support continues.
That is a commitment in a blog post, not a binding condition.
What the Announcement Leaves Out
Huang's post gives no closing date, no deal structure and no enforceable neutrality guarantee, and it skips the regulatory hurdle entirely. An outright purchase at $12.93 billion triggers Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) premerger notification to the US Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice — the mandatory filing Nvidia's structured deals for Groq and Poolside were designed to sidestep.
Nvidia has lost this fight before. Its $40 billion bid for Arm collapsed in 2022 after the FTC, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority, and the EU objected on platform-neutrality grounds. Delangue has described Hugging Face in almost identical terms as the "Switzerland of AI."
Then there is the price. The Information put Hugging Face's annualised revenue near $150 million in August 2026, making $12.93 billion roughly 86 times revenue. In late 2025, Delangue rejected a $500 million Nvidia investment valuing Hugging Face at $7 billion because he did not want a single dominant investor able to sway the platform. He has now sold the company outright to that same investor.
Nvidia's Three Largest Acquisitions
| Target | Value | Date | What it bought |
|---|---|---|---|
| Groq (assets) | $20 billion | December 2025 | Chip and inference assets |
| Hugging Face | $12.93 billion | September 2026 | Open model distribution |
| Mellanox | $7 billion | 2019 | High-speed networking |
Watch AMD and Intel here. The pressure point is not licensing, which nothing suggests will change, but model-page defaults and optimisation priority — the layer just above the hardware, where Hugging Face quietly steers which accelerator a developer reaches for.